EVA Reports

This is the second annual report of the European Vegetation Archive (EVA) to summarizing the current status of the database consortium, our projects and publications.

In March 2018, EVA consisted of 74 databases and 1,496,368 vegetation plots, of which 86% were georeferenced and 63% were assigned to phytosociological syntaxa. 61% of plots may be accessed under semi-restricted regime and 23% under restrict regime, while the other 15% are open access.

In total, EVA data have been delivered to 64 projects, 18 of them starting last year (see the full list of projects here). In the last year two projects have been finished, while other six projects were cancelled by the leading authors (see below). Nowadays there are 38 on-going EVA projects.

Until now, EVA data have contributed to 11 journal papers, one book, nine technical reports, one bachelor thesis and 43 presentations at conferences or workshops. For an updated list of all publications, visit this EVA webpage.

This year, we want to highlight two publications that extent the scientific impact of EVA beyond vegetation science:

In their paper published in Diversity and Distributions 23: 969-981, Wagner et al. make a synthesis of the patterns of plant invasions in European woodlands and their relationships with disturbance, fragmentation and propagule pressure, making a significant contribution to invasion ecology.

The study published by Jiménez-Alfaro et al. in Nature Ecology and Evolution 2: 483-490 used EVA data to address the historical and ecological constraints of species richness in European beech forests since the glacial age, providing a new framework for large-scale studies on community assembly.

We thank the EVA Council and all data contributors for keeping their interest in the consortium, and look forward to see new projects and research outputs in the next year!